I’m coming to the party a little late on this one and without much technical expertise, but I can give you the benefit of my experience. On my old Dell Inspiron 8000 (750Mhz, 512 MB RAM), I’ve tested dozens and dozens of different Linux distros, and dozens of versions of Puppy. I’m not doing anything high tech, so for me the criterion is fairly simple – can I configure my wifi USB dongle, and does it play Youtube videos to any degree? On this particular old box, Puppy rocks…but not necessarily all of them. Anything I’ve tried before version 5.whatever was problematic for me to get my wireless working. So all the versions I could actually test extensively were version 5 and above since I only have two CAT 5 cables hooked to my DSL and they are both occupied. Anything using ‘Barry’s Simple Set-up” tool in the connection wizard works great for me. For a long time I thought Wary rocked, but through experimentation I found Lucid 5.2.8 to play Youtube videos better than ANY other version of any distro I tried. Precise and Slacko are fairly close seconds. Odd, because I thought Wary was specifically compiled to work better with Civil War vintage equipment like mine. On this box, in Lucid, Youtube actually plays like an actual video albeit somewhat hurky-jerky. In all others it plays like a slide show. Your guess is as good as mine as to what makes the difference. All this is worth what you paid for it and probably won’t relate to anything you’re doing, but I thought I’d share.

Update that really IS an update...Apologies for the long post -- but it's worth reading, and you won't really understand what's going on if you don't read it all.

Someone on another forum was really kind to me, just now.

That other forum has a section where people can buy, sell, and trade computer hardware of various form and origin. Within this section, there is a thread started long ago called the Perpetual Freebies Thread -- for stuff that is considered (by these people, most of them enthusiasts aka "computer power users") too old and worthless to charge anything more than the cost of shipping. All sorts of stuff shows up in that thread, and most of it works. In fact, probably a good portion of the computers accessing this forum regularly (Pentium 2/3/4/M and AthlonXP era stuff) would be considered quite suitable for that thread by the people on that forum.

As part of cleaning up a room in my house that has been a computer-equipment closet for entirely too long, I put up a veritable mountain of stuff in that thread. None of it was worth enough money (to them, not me) to bother putting up a For Sale thread. Nobody there would've paid more than shipping costs for any of that (to me) slightly-old stuff.

At some point, fairly recently, having cleaned up the room sufficiently... I posted a Want To Trade thread (not a Want To Buy, as --per usual-- I have basically no money) asking to trade my 60 watt power brick (for the tiny board) for a 90+ watt brick, as the brick I have isn't quite strong enough. I wanted a much more capable brick to allow for margin-of-error in estimating how much power the board was actually wanting to pull. (I can tell that the 60w brick is probably pretty close, as the board does partially boot, but I can't tell how close.)

To make a long story... well, less long... a fellow on that forum came across the three posts where I gave away all that stuff, and he decided to just up and give me the $20 I needed to buy a 96w brick I had picked out on eBay as a just-in-case if I couldn't do the trade after a while.

So, thanks to the wonders of Paypal, I've already ordered the brick. Should be here within a week or so._________________

Received the power supply this morning. I also received something for another project -- I'll probably be working on that other project first, and if there's time to test the power supply with this setup, that will come second.

Tomorrow is going to be busy, so if nothing happens on this today, it will happen Saturday._________________

Working on this now -- it appears that an insufficient power brick was not the issue at all. The replacement brick did not solve my problem.

However, adding a rather inexpensive (and old) surge suppressor did. Looks like the local electrical company slacks off a bit on line regulation when it comes to its more rural customers

This time, instead of a bunch of text scrolling across the screen, involving AUFS and all sorts of low-level software stuff dying a horrible death... the screen blacked out at the xorgwizard point.

This is progress, simply because it hasn't gotten this far before, at least in my house... next I'll try attaching a spare LCD to it that I got for free (it needed a repair which ended up costing me 45 minutes and less than $7 in parts). Maybe it's just having some graphic irregularities._________________

You know how it has multiple connectors for the 12v supply coming onto the board... well, do those connectors all just parallel up? Or do they have something like diodes or fuses linking them to the main power bus of the board? Could there be something like a resistive fuse, dry joint, or dicky diode in the power line? Is it worth trying to bring the 12v onto the board directly or through a different one of the connectors?

Two onboard connectors are available for power input. One is the barrel jack I've been using. The other is a "P4" connector like on a much larger motherboard. 4pins, +12V on two, ground on the other two.

It IS worth noting that one of the times I've gotten this board to power up at the tech shop I was using the P4 connector -- but that was with a power supply that has a bad filter cap in it. Those caps are LOUD when they die completely (or so I hear) and this one, although it hasn't quite died yet, has a foot in the grave. This also means that the output from that power supply is quite likely to be rippletastic. Poor line regulation = not good for electronics!

If the barrel jack on the board is bad... well, there's one way to find out I'll go rig up a jack-to-12v adapter. Good thing I'm well acquainted with the soldering iron _________________

It's dying later in the boot process, though... now it gets through language and keyboard selection before it goes kablooey. Hmmm.

EDIT: three things.
(1) sorry for the blurry pictures -- I am rather a lousy photographer!
(2) my tech wizard dude over at the shop says that this is a problem with AUFS. I'm not smart enough with linux to know if he's right or not.
(3) DSL, which (I think) uses a different kind of union filesystem, boots fine. I don't like DSL, though, so it's not much use here, beyond that of troubleshooting. It is interesting to know, though...

431 died a horrible death but it left a new clue. This time I got good (intelligible) error reporting. It's udevd that's exploding, at least in this case. Went into the board's BIOS and found USB keyboard support enabled.

Wonder if that's the problem...? There's nothing hooked up to USB on this board!

Running memtest86+ -- first pass completed, no errors, took ~45min. Of course, memory is really fickle, so I'll leave it going for a goodly while yet. Almost always, nothing happens in the first pass unless one's ram is royally ****ed._________________

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